Transportation

Ground vehicles

Control has been a key technological enabler in
the aerospace and automotive industries for decades. Despite its historical
role, in recent years the complexity of flight control systems on board of
modern aircrafts/satellites and of Electronic Control Units (up to 80) in
modern cars has increased so dramatically that original equipment manufacturers
urge now significant advances in control theories and tools, far beyond
classical pure regulation. Modern control design problems involve in fact different
and interacting layers of control, from regulatory loops to supervisory
functions for the optimized management of a vehicle, up to the coordination of
multiple vehicles. To contribute helping the European automotive and aerospace
industries surviving the pressure of market competition (especially acute now
because of the global economical crisis), and the steadily more stringent
environmental regulations enforced by public authorities, HYCON2 envisions
three directions of research for new control theories and tools.

Intra-vehicle networked control: networks in vehicles

First, new control designs embedding
optimization procedures are needed to make ground vehicles cleaner (for
instance by further reducing emissions through better control of exhaust gas
composition), and safer (for instance for improved stability of vehicle
dynamics). This includes: coordination of several ECUs networked on the
Controller Area Network (CAN) in automobiles, for instance to optimally manage
in real-time different power sources in hybrid electrical vehicles to reduce
consumptions and emissions. This refers to networks system in vehicles.

Inter-vehicle networked control: networks of vehicles

Second, the host vehicle safety objectives are
to be achieved by active control taking as input the near and possibly far
traffic events by embedded or foresighted systems; mobility is to be increased
through the construction of automated highways and the control of string of
vehicles within these dedicated lanes. This refers to networks between
vehicles.

Multi-vehicle networked control: vehicles in networks

Third, by developing new tools for coordinating the
motion of entire collections of vehicles at the highest layer of control,
including traffic flows (ground transportation) and air traffic management (air
transportation). This refers to vehicles in networks.

Aerospace vehicles

Aerospace has always been a major control topic.
There are many reasons for this close connection between control and aerial
vehicles. They are fast dynamics’ systems that cannot be stabilized by empiric
control strategies. They often present hard non-linearities
or even hybrid behaviour and they usually are underactuated non-holonomic
systems. Finally, they illustrate important issues of non-linear
controllability and observability. Another important
point concerning aerospace is that it is a broad field of applications from
pilot assistance, mainly concerning stability issues, through decision and
artificial intelligence in fully automated Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) to
optimization on air traffic control. Furthermore, aerial vehicles span a wide
range of vehicles from micro-drones around 50 cm large to large
aircrafts as 747 or A380. Aerial vehicles also include distinct airships as
satellites launchers (rockets) to dirigible balloons. Some of the research
topics are described in the following.
In respect to ground vehicles, air vehicles
control will also present a three layer structure, but applied to a broader
scope of systems: micro and mini UAVs,
satellites and satellites' launchers, blimps, and air traffic management and
optimization. The key points in these systems are:

Intra-vehicle networked control: networks in vehicles

A modern airplane presents
more than 300 networked embedded micro-controllers. Furthermore, they are very
sensitive with respect to external and internal variables like height, wind
speed, weight and thrust. There is an important need of new control systems
able to deal with so large number of components, and able to obtain the maximum
real-time information from all sensors, possibly by means of observers.

Inter-vehicle networked control: networks of vehicles

The movements in 3
dimensions of aerial vehicles make them much more complex to control, and their
possible interactions much larger. In fact, many aerial activities imply in the
interaction of more than one system, like rocket launcher multi stages and
possible multi satellites. In the same way, similar to the ground vehicle's
tire-track interaction, an UAV flying indoors must interact with walls, floor
and possible obstacles. This interaction may concern distance keeping as well
as target tracking. Another considered topic concerns the control of swarm of
air vehicles (possibly interacting with ground or water vehicles). The control
of swarms is very important since air vehicles (including satellites) are often
used in groups. They are commonly used as moving sensors like radars and
telescopes, and controlling the position as well as the shape of the group
tunes the resulting measurements.

Multi-vehicle networked control: vehicles in networks

Air traffic control and management has become a major concern. Air
traffic control will probably still be human operated in the future by its so
big importance and responsibility. Nevertheless, the continuous growth of
traffic makes this human based control very difficult. It is important to
provide human controllers with tools to model simulate and predict situations
in order to allow better understanding and decisions. On the other hand, air
traffic management may become more and more automatic. Every day there is a
huge number of flights carrying cargo and passengers all around the world.
These flights go through aerial hubs that concentrate and direct people and
cargo from one initial place to their destinations. The so large number of
simultaneous flights and possible path combinations from one initial point to
its destination make this task very hard. The effect is heavy loaded airports
that concentrate most of traffic, while other well fitted airports are
under-operated. For this reason, air traffic management has become an important
control field in order to optimize the amount of cargo and passengers, as well
as to minimize the travel time.